We’re thrilled at the reception RECAP has gotten in its first few hours.
Among the notable reactions, Techcrunch
discusses
the legal issues and concludes that using RECAP doesn’t violate
copyright law. RECAP is a hot topic of conversation at
Slashdot.
CNet also weighed
in, highlighting
one of the challenges RECAP may face in the coming months:

There are some potential problems. One is that because the RECAP
developers plan to make the source code available, it wouldn’t be hard
for someone to seed the Internet Archive with “official court
documents” that had been modified in some way. (The answer is for
users to pay to download important files from PACER, or for the courts
to employ digital signatures.)

Techdirt calls RECAP“ingenious”,
and concludes that “this is a fantastic idea that hopefully will help to
open up public domain court information that has been locked behind
PACER’s paywalls for too long.”

The RECAP project could also illuminate potential solutions to the
problems that are blocking a more complete PACER overhaul. Despite
growing pressure from Congress to reform the PACER system and make
data available at no cost, the courts are still reluctant to make
major changes to the system because of uncertainty about the cost and
the technical challenges of hosting and distributing the data. The
RECAP project’s effort to mirror a portion of PACER could help answer
those questions and provide a real-world model that demonstrates the
viability of open access.

Thanks to everyone for help spreading the word about RECAP. This project
can’t succeed without your help.